From beneficiaries to businesses to the big picture: Monitoring for sustainability in market-based approaches to sanitation

Since 2008, similar to other organizations in the sanitation sector, Water For People has embarked on a more market-oriented strategy to sanitation development. In short, "market-oriented," in terms of Water For People's work, involves a focus on the private sector (entrepreneurs, businesses, etc.) as the primary actors responsible for catalyzing increased access to sustainable sanitation services among lower income household "customers." Before this shift to a market focus, the primary monitoring activities of Water For People involved an almost exclusive look at sanitation infrastructure at the household level, with little or no focus on other components, and the actors and institutions that sustain them, throughout the entire sanitation service chain. This service chain incorporates not only storage practices at the household, but also sludge disposal, conveyance, treatment and when appropriate, reuse. While access to, and usage of, services at the household level continues to be a key outcome to track in any sanitation program; Water For People's experience with market-oriented programs has highlighted the importance of more holistic monitoring practices and understanding the health of the overall sanitation service chain.

In market-based approaches specifically, sanitation sustainability is predicated on the
assumption that the market will provide the correct incentives to foster and extend
relationships between consumer and provider, households and businesses, and that the sanitation benefits and impacts so sought after by the sanitation sector will be naturally implemented and maintained by a healthy market environment. This implies a new type of monitoring, one that maintains a household-level picture at the outcome level, but also incorporates business-, enabling environment- and program-level assessments to paint a more holistic picture of market health.

This paper, through the presentation of a short case study from Blantyre, Malawi, will illustrate Water For People's efforts to expand monitoring strategies to assess not only household outcomes, but overall sanitation market and service chain health and sustainability.